<HTML>In a message dated 4/21/2003 9:45:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time, dperrin@comcast.net writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Straw men and women set up and mowed down in a tidy fashion. Plus, no mention of Halliburton's (among other US-connected companies) involvement with Saddam during the 90s, under UN cover, and oftentimes through a German company front. I think Cheney and gang scored something like $73 million during this period, but that's ok, sez Hitch, 'cause you're either for Halliburton or for Saddam, and there's no middle ground, and if you opposed the war you don't have a right to speak about it now anyway, as he told me privately a couple weeks ago.   </BLOCKQUOTE> For Saddam or for Halliburton? Why didn' t he just advocate we write checks directly to Halliburton? Why bother with the pretense of bidding? Besides, there's nothing in this article that bears any resemblance to fact: >"At any rate, a burning well is a tough proposition and an uncapped well—permitting >a wholesale discharge—an even tougher one. The situation was being handled by >Boots and Coots, a fire-control company with an almost parodically American >name, which is based in Houston. Boots and Coots, which also worked in Kurdistan >and Kuwait after the much worse conflagrations of 1991, is subcontracted for the >task by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (another name Harold Pinter might have coined >for an American oil company), which is in turn a subdivision of Halliburton. And >"Halliburton," which admittedly sounds more British and toney than Boots and >Coots, was once headed by—cue mood music of sinister corporate skyscraper as >the camera pans up in the pretitle sequence—Vice President Dick Cheney." True, Boots and Coots (I don't know why that's a parodically American name, or what he means by that) was contracted to put out the oil well fires in Kuwait, but at the time, the total cost of putting out all 750 fires was $1.5bln. This time around, the no-bid pre-war declaration contract to Halliburton, and subcontracted to Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown, and Root (again he brings up the American name thing, still don't get it) was capped at $7 bln. After some intense congressional scrutiny from Dingell and Waxman, the Army Corps of Engineers stated it would cost more like $680mln. Still, that would be $1.5bln for 750 fires last time, and $680 mln for 10 fires this time. Somehow, without other countries involved in even seeing the bidding process, the cost of putting out these fires seems to have increased by 34 times since 1991. Hitchens probably sees nothing wrong with this. >"Well, if that doesn't give away the true motive for the war, I don't know what does. >But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam's fires should be allowed to burn out >of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should >have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the >contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein >or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or >of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras. The number of companies able to >deliver such expertise is very limited." The majority of oil well fires put out during the last war were extinguished using sea water. Besides, Boots and Coots is an almost bankrupt company. To me that signals bad financial management, bad services provision or a combination of both.  The last earnings report of B&C had their revenues down 23%, it has defaulted on all its loans, and is trading at 46 cents. Maybe Naomi Klein's "windmill power concern" would be more competent. Nomi </HTML>